The alarm ticker is illustrated in figure 4-29 below. It is a mechanism that can be programmed to indicate events such as alarms, equipment failures and other messages that need to be urgently presented to the operator. When the system has nothing to say the ticker disappears.

The programming of the ticker can be performed by an operator that will be allowed to set which type of messages are shown and for how long they are presented to the viewer. The intent here is to give the administrator control over the level of urgency associated with the message display. For example, incidents may be chosen to be shown on the alarm ticker and they might be programmed to stay on the ticker until the operator acknowledges them. However, communication failures may be limited in the duration of the display. Often during major power outages the system could be swamped with communication failure messages, and limiting the duration of their display would be a desirable feature.